Is Christianity Good for Non-Christians?

Just need to get into it a little bit more. So, good to see you all. A warm welcome in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. My name is Jeff Bradford. I'm senior pastor here. I want to welcome you. We're going to turn to God's word, and we're in a series called "No Bad Questions." The intent of the series is that there should be, in church, with regard to faith, with regard to objections and doubts and questions, really, you should be able to ask anything you want to.

We've been going through various questions. Is God fair? What's God's big deal about sexuality? Is God even really knowable? And each week, we're trying to take on one of these. I'm not claiming to be an expert, but we have two reasons for this. One is to help you, if you're a Christian, to feel confident in having conversations with people who are not believers in Christ, and the other is to share these messages with other people you know.

So today's message is a little different. We are tackling this question this morning: Is Christianity good for non-Christians? Is Christianity good for non-Christians? And by that, I mean the impact of Christianity. Is it of benefit? Has it produced value and good in the world? This is a really difficult question. It's a really important question. I think this is one of the most important questions that people around the globe are asking right now with regard to the Christian faith. It's a very fair question.

How Different People Answer This Question

So let's think about how you might hear this and answer this from a variety of different people. For those who don't identify with Christ, I think a lot of people would say, "Is Christianity good for non-Christians? No." There's been a lot of hatred and violence done in the name of Jesus. There's been a lot of corruption, superstition. There's a lot of bigotry. There's a lot of mistreatment of women, minorities. Lots of people groups have been mistreated by the church.

But if you actually push people and said, "Really, is Christianity good for non-Christians?" A lot of people say, "Well, okay. I'll grant you that it is good for some people." So their answer might be a "maybe." As Mahatma Gandhi famously said about the Christian faith, "I don't like your Christianity, but I do like your Christ." I think a lot of people would make that distinction. So a lot of the world would say, "maybe."

If you ask Christians the same question—"Is Christianity good for non-Christians?"—many would want to answer that question, "yes." But over the last few years with all the public scandals, a lot of people were like, "I don't know." They would also say, "maybe." Now, you ask them, "Is Jesus good for the world?" They would say, "Absolutely. Emphatically, yes." But is Christianity good for the world? Maybe. I don't know.

Jesus' Answer

Now here's what may surprise you this morning: how Jesus answers that question. We're going to look today at Jesus' most famous sermon, just a little tiny bit of it. I like to read long passages of scripture with you all. We have a really short one this morning. And Jesus answers that question with "maybe."

Let's read together from Matthew chapter five, verses 13 through 16. It's our custom to read God's word aloud together, so if you would join your voices with mine.

You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It's no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven. — Matthew 5:13-16

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I'm going to show you all my cards at the beginning this morning. There's contingency built into this passage. There's an "if" in Jesus' words here. There is a "maybe" to what he is saying.

What's fascinating about God is that he has entrusted to congregations like this and people like me and people like you, the message of the gospel, the work of his kingdom. I mean, Jesus is really, really free with his reputation, isn't he? It's staggering that God would be so free with his reputation.

And so is Christianity good for the world? This passage tells us. Jesus says, "Maybe." Maybe. It depends. Potentially.

Now let's look at this passage together because I think while these are in some ways very familiar words—they're part of our vernacular as a culture—I want to make sure you really hear what's being said and not said. You ever heard somebody describe really nice people who are very down to earth? We call them "the salt of the earth." But that's very far afield of what Jesus is talking about in this passage.

A lot of times American politicians describe America as a city on a hill, describing American exceptionalism as if the United States was the new land of Canaan, the promised land—very far apart from what Jesus is saying here. So I want to really listen. I want to go back to the source and hear from Jesus himself about how he answers this question and how he invites you and me to answer the question: Is Christianity good for the world, good for non-Christians, and in our daily lives?

So let's look at this together. First, salt.

The Value of Salt in the Ancient World

We live in a time where salt is one of the cheapest things that you can buy, even in these overinflated prices in your grocery store. It is still one of the cheaper things. And we live in a world that's so dramatically different in the way that we look at salt from ancient people. I just want to go back and give you a couple of context things here.

First, salt is extremely difficult to harvest. I remember visiting Nicaragua to visit some of our missionaries a couple of years ago. We went out toward the coast, and we had this great dinner of sea bass right on the coast, fresh caught. It was a great evening, but as we drove, we drove through salt flats right by the beach where people were harvesting salt. And this is how people in non-industrial nations harvest salt: they would flood a field with seawater and then let it evaporate. Flood the field with seawater, let it evaporate over and over and over until there's a white layer, a thick white layer. Then somebody had to do the horrible job of going out with a shovel and scraping that up.

Now, salt corrodes. People harvesting salt were covered in order to keep it from eating at their skin and eating at their tools. It's a horrible job. Salt in a non-industrial country is a very precious commodity because it's so very difficult to harvest. When Jesus talks about salt, he's not talking about the cheapest thing in his grocery store. He's talking about something that was very valuable.

Salt is essential, of course, to human existence. We need salt in our diets to live. And when Jesus uses this example about salt, he is not using it the way we think of it. We think of salt as a flavor enhancer or something you should probably use a little bit less of in your diet. Many of you may be familiar with the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat book and the show that went with it. In her book, Samin Nosrat writes: "If only one lesson of this book stays with you, let it be this one. Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient because we are hardwired to crave salt to make sure we get enough of it." There's something about us that's made to enjoy and want salt because our bodies need it. It is essential to our survival.

Salt was also essential to food preservation. Salt was used to cure meat, prevent it from spoiling, going bad. The closest you probably get to this in your day is eating beef jerky. Anybody love beef jerky? Or if you've smoked meat, you rub salt into the meat in order to make it retain moisture. But it's hard to overstate to a community that has no refrigeration, has no preservatives, the value of salt in preserving meat. It was so valuable that our word for salary comes from the word salt. Soldiers in the Roman Empire were often paid in salt if coins were not available. This is where our word salary comes from. Salt is that precious.

Also, salt heals. Have you ever gone to the beach in the summertime with a scrape somewhere on your body or a cut? It's very different from going to a lake or river or stream. You go swim in those and it stays about the same. You go to the beach, and it's surprising how fast your body heals because the salt helps with the healing.

That's the world into which Jesus was preaching. When he talked about salt, this wasn't an extra. This wasn't a thing that was take-it-or-leave-it. This was immensely valuable, and its need was immediately apparent. Jesus is saying the world needs salt. The world needs salt. Not just to enhance flavor, but to survive. Not just to make things taste better, but to preserve decay. Not just as an extra, but as an essential.

Now, it's easy to then take that metaphor and overstate what we mean about our world when Jesus says the world needs salt. Think about when you harvest vegetables, you harvest fruit, when you butcher meat. It is immediately fresh, and as long as you consume it immediately, it's great. But what Jesus is saying is that this world has the potential for decay in it.

Now, there have been times in human history where people have been overly optimistic about the human experiment. I think about the Enlightenment period in Europe. I think about post-World War II America, where people look at it and say, "We're just going to get better and better." Social Darwinism—things are just going to get better and better and better. We're not in that place right now. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of insecurity.

So when Jesus says there's a potential for rot, I think many of us can say, I know what you mean. Our institutions are prone to decay. We can look at our political system and say, I'm not sure this is what the founding fathers intended. This is exactly how it was supposed to go. We can look at our own bodies and say, you know, if you're 25, enjoy that metabolism. Really, I mean, just enjoy that. Please go somewhere really good and eat something really bad after church today for me. But if you're 25, you're beginning to be in touch with the fact that your body is falling apart. This is what aging is. All of us will be dust one day. All of us have a shelf life, an expiration date.

Our environment is falling apart. Now, of course, that's more obvious maybe in the last few years where it used to be talk about the environment and what's happening with the virus was more debatable. Right now we're watching a lot of crazy that's happening in our world. And it reminds us, even second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. We're in a world that is going to fall apart. We have a sun that's going to burn out. Even our relationships. Your closest relationships require maintenance. They require communication and resolving conflict because everything is prone to decay. Things are prone to fall apart.

Jesus is saying this to us. This is the world we live in—it is subject to decay. Now, I don't want to overstate this. There are lots of Christians who love to do gloom and doom on you. Like, this is the worst time in the history of the world. I want to be really careful about that. There is such a thing as common grace where God limits things from being as bad as they could be. Many of you are surprised by the beauty and the goodness in this world. And we could say, the writer of Ecclesiastes, sure, there are bad things, but there's nothing new under the sun. This isn't the worst, worst, worst, and the Christian church has survived through lots and lots worse than this. But I want to press this upon you: our world is subject to decay, subject to rot. It needs salt.

Light in Darkness

Second metaphor here is light. Jesus' analogy is like a city without light. We need light, a people in darkness. Modern people don't know much about real darkness. We talk about light pollution. Light pollution means that you have to go far away if you really want to see the stars, way up in the mountains, way out in the ocean. To really see the stars, you have to go far away.

We don't really know what it's like to live in a dark, dark place. And while we don't know what it's like to live in ancient times without street lights and without floodlights and headlights, we do know what happens when a person doesn't get enough light. You ever heard of seasonal affective disorder? Seasonal affective disorder is when people in northern climates don't get enough exposure to sunlight. They have an absence of vitamin D. It can actually make them physically sick. Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing, and we know what it's like, therefore, for people to need light.

Light is really different from salt in this way. When salt works, it disappears. You take salt in a bowl, it's a pile of white flakes, and you take it and rub it into meat, and the salt begins to disappear on you because it's absorbing the moisture. It's becoming the same color of the meat that it's being rubbed into. It sort of dies in that way. Salt disappears.

But when you turn on a flashlight or a candle in a really dark house, you know that that light is not only something you see, but by it, you see everything else. The light dispels darkness. The light throws into relief things that are hidden. And we know that darkness is dangerous. In our country, the statistics on violent crime are overwhelmingly in favor of crimes being committed at night. Darkness is dangerous.

So we live in a world that I think Jesus is telling us has maybe not seasonal affective disorder, but spiritual affective disorder. It's dark in here. Despite an abundance of light pollution, we live in a time where there's lots of confusion about what is truth. We don't know what news sources to follow. We're confused by what we hear, and there's a real sense of darkness all around us. Darkness is disorienting and confusing. I want you to think about waking up in a hotel room in the middle of the night, fumbling around, looking for the light switch. That's what darkness does.

Jesus is saying this world is subject to decay. It needs salt. It's confused and confusing. It needs light. But this is where I want us to read the fine print on this passage. It's easy if you've grown up in church to go, yeah, yeah. We're the light of the world. We're the salt of the earth. But Jesus literally says that here. But read the fine print. Read the fine print.

He's more specific about how and who. How and who is the source of that salt and that light. And here's my contention for you this morning: Jesus is the salt we need. Jesus is the light that we need.

If you read the four biographies of Jesus in the Bible, the gospels, they tell us that Jesus's ministry was a salt ministry. He went from village to village healing those who could not see, those who could not hear, those who could not walk. He restored people from death to life. He did things that we even consider really far afield. He cast demons out of people who were possessed, whose lives were under oppression. Jesus healed those with skin diseases and internal diseases. Jesus' ministry was a ministry of salt. Can I say this? Jesus was kind of salty. His ministry was such that he's not just an itinerant teacher, but his teaching was always backed up, always marked. John calls it signs. Signs like billboards that showed forth this is what God is about in the world. Jesus' ministry was a ministry of salt.

We call him the great physician, for that's from Mark chapter two, where Jesus himself says,

It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. — Mark 2

I've walked with this congregation long enough to know that there are salt stories in this room where the intervention, the breaking in of God into some of your lives was a salt story of Jesus preserving your life from your own self-destructive tendencies, Jesus pulling you back from ways that you are prone toward your own harm. Jesus bringing healing and wholeness in places where you have been either harming other people or been harmed deeply by other people.

Now, that's not to say that they're all healed. We long as a congregation for more of Jesus' salt work among us, but Jesus is the salt. Jesus is the salt we need.

Jesus is also the light of the world. John's gospel begins with that statement.

The light shines in the darkness — John 1

Not referring to Christians, referring to Jesus himself. Jesus in John 8 says,

I am the light of the world. — John 8

When he says this, he doesn't mean I am a light like we use in our modern day era. We talk about people who are modern literary lights. We mean somebody who's a thought leader, somebody who's a great writer, people have insights and encouragements into our culture. We're not saying that about Jesus. Jesus says something radical that can't be nuanced or toned down. He says, I am the light. I am the only one exclusive. References again from John chapter 14 where he says,

I am the way and the truth and the life. — John 14

Not a way, not a truth, not live your truth, not a light, but the illumination by which we see ourselves and we see everything else around us. He casts everything else into relief. I know how arrogant that sounds. I know how exclusive that sounds, how extreme that sounds. That's exactly what Jesus means by that. I am the light.

But again, notice the fine print on this passage. When Jesus says, you're the light of the world, you're the salt of the earth, speaking of his followers, he's not saying that we have light in and of ourselves, or we have salt in and of ourselves, or we have truth that we're better or more moral or smarter than anybody else. Notice the fine print. He says two things here.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden. No one takes a lamp and puts it under a basket but on a lampstand. — Matthew 5:14-15

Think about both those statements. City on a hill, why would he describe a city on a hill? At nighttime, you see the city from far away, not because the city itself is light, but because the city contains all the lights from all the homes, even all the businesses. The city on the hill can't be hidden because it has light in it. A lamp. Nobody puts it under a basket but on a lampstand because the lamp is, in many ways, a container for light. This is the picture that Jesus is giving to us. You are, we are, light containers, salt shakers, if you will. We don't have this in and of ourselves. Ours is a derivative light. Ours is derivative salt and healing. It's showing off not us, but Him.

The Real Question

I think if you change the question for this morning, for my sermon, if you ask the question, is Jesus good for the world? Of course, Christians would say, yeah. Of course, he is. He's the light. He's the healer. But even if you ask people who aren't Christians, is Jesus good for the world? People still, even in this post-post-post Christian culture, say yes.

Over the last couple of years, there have been so many bad stories about Christians and Christianity and Christian institutions. I think about the Me Too and then the Church Too movement, stories of sexual abuse. I think about all the deconversion movement that's happened over the last few years. I think about all the church scandals that have happened over the last few years. And yet, Jesus is still good for unbelievers. This is why Mahatma Gandhi said, I like your Christ.

I don't like your Christians, but I like your Christ. Is Jesus good for the world? Yes.

During this time over the last few years, I was really surprised. There was a woman on our staff, Mika Cedillos, who was invited by some friends who wanted to understand Jesus. "Would you help us understand Jesus?" And so they read the gospel of John together. This was at the height of all the chaos of the last few years.

And what she found was people—not people saying "I don't want to hear about this Jesus." People are hungry in America, in the inner city, today, who are saying, "Yes, I actually do want to know him. I want to know more about him." That's good news because we're not called to be light in and of ourselves, to muster up some kind of healing powers within ourselves. We're called to demonstrate and show off and show people the light that they want and they long for, that their hearts need—the healing that their hearts need.

You are invited. That's just the point of this sermon. You're being invited by Jesus into his agenda for the world. And it's truly an invitation. There is contingency. There is an if. You don't have to do this to be a Christian. Jesus is not saying, "To be a Christian, you need to be salt. To be a Christian, you need to be light." But we're being invited by our savior into his change agenda for this world, into his preserving work as salt, into his light work, showing off Jesus.

I want you to think about both of these callings. I want to ask you: Are you willing to help answer this question? Is Jesus good for non-Christians? Is Christianity good for non-Christians? We get to answer that question.

Salt and Light: Two Different Callings

First, to be salt. To be salt means to embrace a calling in your life of influence. Remember, salt works in many ways when it's rubbed into meat by disappearing. When it is scattered and rubbed in and worked into the meat, it sort of dies. You don't see it anymore. Salt has deep impact, but it's not seen. It's felt. It's experienced.

The light is opposite in many ways. The calling to be light, by definition, must be seen, and light shows off everything else.

Here's the danger, Jesus says. This is the contingency in this passage. We can become worthless and irrelevant. How does salt become worthless? The chemical compound doesn't break down. It's one of the most stable chemical bonds there is. Salt becomes worthless by being diluted. It loses saltiness by being diluted, by just wanting to be like the rest of the world, by becoming like the rest of the world. There's nothing distinctive, nothing different. This calling costs. To be a person who embraces the calling to be salt in this world will cost you.

How does light become worthless or irrelevant? Well, Jesus tells us. By refusing to be seen, putting something over the light, hiding the light. This is so many Christians. I think if there's one impulse that I find of Christians, it's this, and I'm right with everybody on this: I kind of just want to be normal. Do you feel that? You look around and you're like, "There's a lot of wackos who call themselves Jesus followers. I just want to be not one of those kind of Christians."

Oh, I'm all by myself up here this morning? I doubt that. I know y'all. Y'all live where I live. You put your pants on one leg at a time like I do. We do not want to be those kind of people, and so there's a tendency in us to just want to disappear. The over response is to be undercover.

There's a call this morning to recognize that God has put us—like the salt shaker, sprinkled us. He has put us in places in our city. He's put us in places in our relationships on purpose and calls us, therefore, to exercise this courage to be salt.

To embrace God's call to be salt means to recognize: I am not in this lab by mistake. I'm not in this office by mistake. I'm not in this dorm by mistake. I'm not in this cubicle by mistake. I'm not in this playgroup by mistake. I'm not in this research team by mistake. I'm not in this band by mistake. I'm not in this neighborhood by mistake. God has placed you all kinds of places.

A lot of times, I think the danger for Christians is we want to be salt of the church, but Jesus says you're salt of the world, salt of the earth.

To embrace God's call to be light means that you publicly identify yourself in front of people as one who belongs to Him. As I said last week, I am His. By your word and your work, you tell a story. Living in the light means letting your light shine before people so they see your good works, they see your faith, they hear your testimony, and they praise your Father in heaven.

I know of one and only one person who ever came to Christ by Jesus directly intervening with him without the aid of other people. That was the apostle Paul. He's riding on his donkey along the Damascus Road. The rest of you ain't the apostle Paul, and you ain't riding donkeys.

And I could guarantee if we go person by person through this room and said, "Who was the light in your life?" you have a name. Maybe it was a parent, a Sunday school teacher, a friend, a roommate. There are stories upon stories because all of us have not some miraculous knocked-off-your-donkey conversion story, but somebody who stepped into your life and showed you light—Jesus.

We're not called to be salt of the church, and we're not called to be the light of the church. Lots of Christians, this is the only place we want to shine. The rest of the week, we're like, "We've got a secret identity." But when Christians embrace God's calling to be salt and light—not because we are, but because he is—do you know what happens? The world changes because of this.

Christians before us in every generation—yeah, lots of people have gotten this wrong, but we're sitting here today because Christians before us got this right. They did embrace the call to salt. They did embrace the call to light. They showed off to a watching world. Is Christianity good for non-Christians? Is Christ good for non-Christians? And people looked at him and said, "Yeah."

Tom Holland's Dominion

There's a book I'd commend to you. It was written by Tom Holland, the historian—not Spider-Man Tom Holland. I know you all know the Spider-Man one, right? But Tom Holland, a fascinating historian. In recent years, he published a book called Dominion, and he was doing research on the impact of Christianity throughout the centuries since its beginning. And he did so as an unbeliever and historian. He traces through the centuries the impact over time, and his book is really about this question: Is Christianity good for non-Christians?

Here's what he writes. The story of Christianity throughout the centuries:

"is the story of power willingly spent on behalf of the vulnerable, strength deployed to protect the weak, the story of the strong choosing to play the victim on behalf of the oppressed, to spare them from ignorance and shame. It is a story about how Christ's sacrificial dominion mediated through the church's sacrificial presence has liberated and is liberating the world."

There's a lot of bad to tell about Christians through the centuries, but there's also a lot of good. And Holland has since become a believer. It's a great book. You'll be hearing more about it in the weeks to come.

You know, the world says to Christians, "Hey, you keep your religion to yourself." And so many of us are like, "Yeah, that's a great idea. I would prefer it that way." But I'm so grateful that for centuries before us, Christians haven't done exactly that.

The Church's Global Witness

I'll close with this. I saw a video recently by a British pastor and evangelist named John Jay John. Jay John is telling a story about how he describes what he does for a living. So he was on a flight, sitting next to this woman. They're on the way to Singapore, and they're talking about what they do and the usual questions. And he's like, "I'm so tired of telling people I'm a reverend." So when this woman asked him, "What do you do?" he says, "Well, I work for a global conglomerate."

She says, "Do you?"

He says, "Yes. In fact, we have outlets in nearly every country of the world and nearly every city of the world."

And she's like, "Wow. Tell me more about that."

He says, "Well, yeah, we've got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters. We do marriage work. We've got orphanages. We've got feeding programs."

She's like, "Wow."

And he said, "At this point, her voice is echoing through the rows around her on the plane." And she says, "What else do you do?"

He said, "We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation work. We look after people basically from birth to death in the area of behavioral alteration."

And she's like, "Wow. What is this called?"

He said, "It's the church. It's the church."

See, generations before us have answered this call—salt and light. And Jesus offers us this. This is the unique one about all this series I'm doing: Is Christianity good for non-Christians? You get to answer that question. I get to answer that question. Jesus says, "Maybe," and then invites us. "You want to come? It'll cost you. But there is so much opportunity to see the Lord at work."

I think if we're starved for anything as a congregation, it's good news about Jesus really doing real things in our world. Will we give him a chance to do so?

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me? Father, we thank you that you are the light and that you are the salt. I pray for all of those who are here this morning, Father, that we would experience you in both of those ways. Lord, our lives desperately need your preserving and healing. There are areas deep within each of us, Lord, that are prone to rot and decay. Lord, we need you to work deep within us—physically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually.

Lord, we pray that we would experience you as the light, that you would show us the way and invite us to follow you on the way. And by shining your light in our lives, you would drive all the darkness away.

We also pray, Father, this morning for our church, that we would embrace more fully the call to be people of deep influence wherever you've put us, people who speak and show off the light of Jesus in our relationships with the people all around us.

And we pray that the world would have cause to rejoice that Jesus is real and Jesus is king.

We pray this in his name. Amen.